This paper attempts to resituate the Irish so-called ‘Royal’ sites within our vision of the Iron Age by challenging current understanding of their function as primarily situated in a ceremonial or ritual realm. While the evidence from these sites speaks to the complexity of their function, conceptualisation, and symbolic relevance, it is argued here that they are integral focal points of settled landscapes. Their architecture is suggested to address very specific concerns of the agrarian communities that built them and, in its very distinct change over the course of the Iron Age, to reflect broader societal developments, namely the emergence and decline of new society formations. Artefacts and ecofacts, architecture and landscape context of these sites contain a wealth of information on the activities that were taking place on and near them. It is argued that, freed from a binary ritual/profane interpretational framework, this evidence becomes readable as a record of Iron Age society and its dramatic changes over time.

The number of Mesolithic structures known in Britain has significantly increased since 2000, providing new opportunities for economic and social interpretations of this period. We describe a further structure, represented by features from the Mesolithic site of Criet Dubh, Isle of Mull. We compare the inferred Criet Dubh structure to other Mesolithic structures from Britain, notably those described as ‘pit-houses’. We then consider the implications of the radiocarbon dates from such structures for the tempo of occupation and past settlement patterns. While the use of Bayesian analysis of radiocarbon dates has encouraged interpretations of prolonged occupation and sedentism, we propose alternative interpretations with patterns of intermittent occupation for Criet Dubh and the pit-houses, involving their re-use after extended periods of abandonment within a sparsely populated landscape. The ability to debate such interpretations reflects the transformation in Mesolithic research made possible by the discovery of such structures, the use of multiple radiocarbon determinations, the application of Bayesian analysis, and the exploration of associations between cultural and environmental change. These developments have made the Mesolithic a particularly innovative period of study.

Landscape geophysical survey around the small upland ‘henge’ at Yarnbury, Grassington, North Yorkshire revealed few anthropogenic features around the enclosure but did identify a small rectangular structure in the same field. Sample trenching of this feature, radiocarbon and archaeomagnetic dating proved it to be an earlier Neolithic post and wattle structure of a type that is being increasingly recognised in Ireland and the west of Britain. It is the first to be recognised in the Yorkshire Dales and it is argued that the Dales may have been pivotal in the Neolithic for east–west trade as well as pastoral upland agriculture.

Radiocarbon dating and Bayesian chronological modelling, undertaken as part of the investigation by the Times of Their Lives project into the development of Late Neolithic settlement and pottery in Orkney, has provided precise new dating for the Grooved Ware settlement of Barnhouse, excavated in 1985–91. Previous understandings of the site and its pottery are presented. A Bayesian model based on 70 measurements on 62 samples (of which 50 samples are thought to date accurately the deposits from which they were recovered) suggests that the settlement probably began in the later 32nd century cal bc (with Houses 2, 9, 3 and perhaps 5a), possibly as a planned foundation. Structure 8 – a large, monumental structure that differs in character from the houses – was probably built just after the turn of the millennium. Varied house durations and replacements are estimated. House 2 went out of use before the end of the settlement, and Structure 8 was probably the last element to be abandoned, probably during the earlier 29th century cal bc. The Grooved Ware pottery from the site is characterised by small, medium-sized, and large vessels with incised and impressed decoration, including a distinctive, false-relief, wavy-line cordon motif. A considerable degree of consistency is apparent in many aspects of ceramic design and manufacture over the use-life of the settlement, the principal change being the appearance, from c. 3025–2975 cal bc, of large coarse ware vessels with uneven surfaces and thick applied cordons, and of the use of applied dimpled circular pellets. The circumstances of new foundation of settlement in the western part of Mainland are discussed, as well as the maintenance and character of the site. The pottery from the site is among the earliest Grooved Ware so far dated. Its wider connections are noted, as well as the significant implications for our understanding of the timing and circumstances of the emergence of Grooved Ware, and the role of material culture in social strategies.

Cunliffe's excavations at Danebury have revealed an Iron Age settlement in extraordinary detail. Its inhabitants have come to represent, in the popular literature at least, the idealised hillfort community of warriors, craftsmen, farmers, and their families in a hierarchically ordered settlement system. This model has been vigorously challenged, although largely from a theoretical perspective, and there has been little contextual re-analysis of the dataset. This paper seeks to re-examine the Danebury structural assemblage and question why Iron Age people came together in this place, and how those that did come perceived their place within wider group identities. By examining patterns of activity within the interior of Danebury this paper demonstrates that the nature of the community that resided in the hillfort changed considerably over the course of the Early and Middle Iron Age. In particular, it is argued that Danebury was occupied by a permanent population. The organisation of domestic space, however, was tightly managed. In the early period occupation was characterised by single round-houses of individual household units emphasising their distinctiveness by spatial isolation and variability in round-house design. A dramatic change in the nature and intensity of occupation came in the late period. A large number of ‘identikit’ round-houses were tightly packed into the quarry hollows in the lee of the ramparts. This probably represents households from the surrounding settlements moving into the hillfort. It is also argued that the communal construction and maintenance of Danebury's defences would have been a way for a dispersed population to have reproduced a sense of community. Participation may also have been a mechanism of maintaining networks and relationships with other households in the long term

Neolithic and Bronze Age settlements in Britain and Ireland have, on occasion, been referred to as being prehistoric villages but there is little agreement as to what a settlement from these periods should consist of for it to be confidently identified as such. A particular problem is that the development of villages in Britain and Ireland is commonly seen as being a medieval phenomenon and most discussions regarding the essential characteristics of villages are centred on medieval evidence. This paper examines which features of a prehistoric settlement can be used to determine if the use of the term ‘village’ is appropriate, ultimately finding the number of contemporary households to be the primary concern. Sites which have been identified specifically as being Neolithic or Bronze Age villages are critically reviewed, as are a selection of sites where the designation may be appropriate but where the term has so far been avoided. The number of sites from both periods that could justify being identified as being villages is found to be low, and in all cases it seems that moves toward larger nucleated settlements are geographically and chronologically restricted and are followed by a return to dispersed settlement patterns. This curious pattern of the rapid creation and decline of villages at a regional level is contrasted with different explanations for the development of nucleated settlements from other areas and during other time periods, which revolve around economic and agricultural intensification, the development of more hierarchical societies and the increase in structured trading networks. They do not fit well with either our current perceptions of Neolithic and Bronze Age societies, or with the strictly localised moves towards nucleation that were observed. New explanations with a more local focus are found to be required

This paper is based on the 2012 Europa Lecture and discusses the relationship between the forms and structures of domestic buildings and those of public monuments. Its chronological scope extends between the Neolithic period and the Viking Age in western, northern and central Europe, with a special emphasis on the contrast between circular and rectilinear architecture. There were practical limits to the diameters of circular constructions, and beyond that point they might be organised in groups, or their characteristic outlines were reproduced in other media, such as earthwork building. By contrast, the main constraint on building rectangular houses was their width, but they could extend to almost any length. That may be one reason why they only occasionally provided the prototype for specialised forms of monument such as mounds or enclosures. Instead rectangular buildings played a wide variety of roles from domestic dwellings to ceremonial centres.

This paper presents the results of several years' research on late Iron Age enclosed settlements in west Wales. Geophysical survey was conducted on 21 sites and three of these, Troedyrhiw, Ffynnonwen, and Berry Hill, were part-excavated. Most sites examined were heavily plough-damaged, but results of the surveys and excavations demonstrated that substantial archaeological remains survive. Approximately 60 enclosed settlements lay in the core study area of southern Ceredigion (Cardiganshire), half of which were oval in shape and half rectangular. Both types contain suites of buildings seen in much of the British Iron Age – round-houses and 4-/6-post structures. Evidence from the excavations supports data from elsewhere in the region indicating that small oval enclosures appear in the landscape in the 2nd–1st centuries bc, with rectangular enclosures constructed right at the end of the Iron Age. Dating is based almost entirely on radiocarbon determinations as, in common with other similar-aged sites in west Wales, artefacts are almost completely absent. It was not possible during excavation at Troedyrhiw to conclusively demonstrate late prehistoric use of the rectangular enclosed settlement, but a Roman pottery assemblage in the upper fills of the enclosure ditch coupled with a two phase entrance is interpreted as indicating Late Iron Age construction. More complex remains were revealed during excavations at Ffynnonwen, a circular enclosed settlement within a larger oval enclosure. Here, three round-houses, a 4- and 6-post structure and other remains were investigated and radiocarbon dated to the 8th–6th centuries bc through to the early Romano-British period. Berry Hill, an inland promontory fort, appeared to be unfinished and abandoned. Radiocarbon determinations indicated a Late Bronze Age construction (10th–8th centuries bc). The paper concludes with a consideration of a number of interpretive issues regarding settlement, enclosure, identity, and ways of living.

The reconstructed roundhouse is everywhere: on the television, in the literature, in the landscape. It has powerful currency in both the public and academic understandings of the vernacular architecture of later British prehistory, in particular for the Iron Age. However, because the focus of these reconstructions is normally on technologies and engineering principles on the one hand, or on the experience of their occupation on the other, the roundhouse reconstruction — even after more than 30 years research around them — in fact currently tells us remarkably little about the past and a great deal about who we understand ourselves to be. This paper will explore what insight roundhouse reconstructions currently do and do not give into later British prehistory and what they may be able to indicate if the act of building is taken as a theme over the technologies of their construction or the experience of their space.

This paper addresses a small group of Neolithic monuments recorded as cropmarks in eastern lowland Scotland that have been termed timber halls, the best known example being the large rectangular building, Balbridie. Three such sites have now been excavated, and all have been shown to date to the early centuries of the Neolithic and to have been largely similar structures; further possible examples in the cropmark record will be assessed, through looking at the use of the term ‘timber hall’ in Scottish archaeology over the past 40 years. The paper will also address a number of sites, mostly known as cropmarks, which have similar dimensions and architectural traits to these timber halls. Excavations, however, have shown them to have a very different form (for instance, probably unroofed), and to date to the latter half of the 4th millennium cal BC, several centuries later than the first timber halls. Drawing on excavation results, cropmarks, and evidence from outwith Scotland, this paper will discuss the changing form and function of the Neolithic ‘timber hall’ tradition in Scotland, arguing that roofed ‘big houses’ were later replaced by ceremonial and mortuary ‘cult houses’, drawing on social memory and tradition.

In many regions in north-west Europe, the Middle Bronze Age is seen as the first period in which a ‘humanly-ordered’ agrarian landscape took shape that has resonance with rural landscapes of historical periods. But what did this ‘ordering’ actually involve? Basing ourselves on a survey of the rich evidence from the Netherlands – including the evidence on everyday settlement sites as well as the use of the non-everyday ‘ritual’ zones in the land – we argue that from c. 1500 cal BC onwards the landscape was organised and structured by specific, ideological concepts of regularity and categorisation that are distinct from those of the preceding Neolithic and Earlier Bronze Age. We will show that elaborate three-aisled farmhouses of very regular layout emerged here around c. 1500 cal BC and argue that this profound architectural change cannot simply be explained by assuming agricultural intensification combined with indoor stalling of cattle, as conventional theories would have it. Also, we will argue that the way in which the settled land was used from this period onwards was also different than before. Neolithic and Early Bronze Age settlements, far from being ‘ephemeral’, seem to have been organised along different lines than those of the Middle Bronze Age-B (MBA-B: 1500–1050 cal BC). The same holds true for the way in which barrows structured the land. Although they were significant elements in the organisation of the landscape from the Late Neolithic onwards and do hardly change in outer form, we will show that MBA barrows played a different role in the structuring of landscape, adhering to long-term categorisation and zoning therein. A similar attitude can also be discerned in patterns of object deposition in ‘natural’ places. Practices of selective deposition existed long before the MBA-B but, because of different subsistence bases of the pre-MBA-B communities, their interpretations of unaltered ‘natural’ places will have differed significantly. The presence of multiple deposition zones in the MBA-B also must have relied on a unprecedented way of persistent categorisation of the ‘natural’ environment. Finally, the evidence from ‘domestic, funerary and ritual’ sites is recombined in order to typify what the Dutch Middle Bronze Age landscape was about.

A 2.5 ha open area excavation at South Hornchurch, Essex (London Borough of Havering) has revealed an extensive Late Bronze Age settlement on the Thames terrace gravels. The site is particularly significant because of the association of a circular ditched enclosure or ringwork with a contemporary field system, as well as clusters of enclosed and unenclosed circular structures. Two enclosures were formed by rings of pits or large post-holes. Placed pottery deposits and unurned cremation burials were found, mostly associated with structures and entranceways. Other finds include both plain and decorated Post Deverel-Rinibury pottery, burnt flint, spindle whorls, possible loomweights, perforated clay slabs, and a bivalve clay sword mould. The entire site was subsequently sealed by a buried colluvial ploughsoil which almost certainly represents the final phase of Late Bronze Age activity. The site's spatial structure, environmental context, and regional significance are discussed.

This paper explores how the lifecycles of Middle Bronze Age settlements were intimately related at both a practical and metaphorical level to the lifecycles of their inhabitants. Many settlements of this date appear to have been single-generational sites. Building sequences and other changes in the use of settlement space can be understood within a framework that explores how the demographic, social, and economic circumstances of a site's occupants changed over time. However, the lifecycle of the settlement was not only related to that of its occupants in practical terms; each was also a symbolic representation of the other. For example, such acts as the deposition of whole quernstones or animal burials in pits and ditches may have been carried out at critical points in the lifecycle of a settlement, its structures, and its inhabitants. The notion that settlements had lifecycles introduces the possibility of anthropomorphic symbolism in house architecture, a suggestion that may help to explain the presence of a standardised house form during the Middle Bronze Age. Yet, despite the formality of the architecture, there was considerable diversity in how space was actually used within the round-house. Likewise, variability in other aspects of these settlement sites suggests that, although cultural ideals may have existed, in practice the developmental cycle of each household group depended on a particular set of social and material circumstances as well as on household members' commitment to communal tradition.

The exceptional preservation of structural detail at the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B site of ‘Ain Ghazal allows analysis of techniques of house building, and of sequences of construction and modification of houses. Frequent remodelling was common, with a trend towards smaller residential areas. The concept of the ‘development cycle’ is applied, to explain the structural modifications in terms of the changing nature of the co-residential group.

The Later Bronze Age site at Black Patch consisted of hut platforms and enclosures set in a system of rectangular fields. The settlement area is overlooked by round barrows. Area and sample excavations of the settlement revealed circular huts and activity areas within a C-14 date range of 1070 ± 70 bc–830 ± 80 bc. Extensive economic data in the form of seeds, animal bones, foreign stones and artefacts were recovered. These formed the basis of an economic resource-area analysis undertaken around Black Patch and other contemporary occupation sites on the South Downs. From this an economic activity model is proposed.

It is now more than a decade since Avery & Close-Brooks (1969) and Musson (1970) recognized that some roundhouses which, at first sight, appeared in the archaeological record to have been single-ring buildings were most probably of double-ring construction. Using the excavation-plans of timber roundhouses at the Bronze Age settlements on Shearplace Hill in Dorset and Itford Hill in Sussex as the mainstays of their arguments, these writers gave reasons for believing that the ring of postholes, which constituted the principal archaeological evidence for the buildings in question, had held the uprights of an internal roof-supporting structure, while a separate, concentric, external wall, set some distance outside that post-ring, had received a more meagre earth-cut foundation, which in some cases had either ‘disappeared’ or ‘escaped detection’. These particular roundhouses had each stood on a terraced platform, and it is likely that this had afforded their ground-plans a measure of protection against at least mechanical weathering, with the result that ‘tenuous traces’ of an outer wall-groove survived in the chalk-bedrock of the House A platform at Shearplace Hill, while at Itford Hill the extent of the ‘trodden chalk’ areas of some of the floors supplied a vital clue.

For many years excavations within British prehistoric settlement sites were largely confined to selective sampling of a very limited nature since this approach, it was thought, offered the best chance of locating an intensively occupied area from which dating evidence and perhaps even the ground plan of a structure might be recovered. More recently, with the results of a small number of large-scale area excavations to draw upon, it has become possible not only to examine the plans of individual buildings in isolation but to identify standard structural designs used repeatedly on the same sites and, further, to learn something of the overall disposition of structures within the settlement plan. This increasing body of evidence is beginning to reveal, as analogy with historic and existent settlements might anticipate, a basic dichotomy between those which grew and those which were created. To establish a terminology, we should first recognize the essential distinction between a settlement plan and a planned settlement. All settlements have a plan, but not all were consciously planned. Many will have resulted from gradual growth over a period of time, developing from a nucleus to which additions and replacements were made as required (i.e. in the parlance of urban geographers, organic settlements). Accordingly, their plans should not normally be expected to display any great degree of orderliness and will be particularly unlikely to incorporate a systematic pattern of streets.

The site was first occupied in the Bronze Age by a small agricultural settlement, consisting of two circular timber houses with ancillary structures and ditches. One house was eventually replaced by a stone structure. A single radiocarbon determination suggests that the settlement is to be dated within the period 1700–1300 B.C. The Iron Age settlement of Trevisker Round was probably established in the second century B.C., if not earlier. An original inner enclosure, half an acre in area, housing a single defended farmstead, was later superseded by a larger defended enclosure, 3 acres in area, also with circular timber houses and occupation areas. This occupation was followed at the end of the first century A.D., by a Romano-British phase of occupation, which lasted until the middle of the second century.

The first account of the Scottish Iron Age which attempted to set its monuments and material cultures in their British and North European context was that published by V. G. Childe in 1935. Childe suggested that the brochs, which had hitherto been at best discussed in a purely local context, might be understood better if regarded as only one aspect of the more widespread phenomenon of the hundreds of tiny stone fortlets, or duns, of the highlands and islands, termed by him the Castle Complex to distinguish them from the larger forts of the lowlands. He also suggested that parallels between the bone weaving equipment found on broch sites and in the Glastonbury lake village provided a clue to the origins of their immigrant builders.

Eighteen years ago Sir Lindsay Scott, following Childe's lead, published in these Proceedings two long papers on the brochs and wheelhouses of the Scottish Atlantic Iron Age and the fact that subsequent discoveries have disproved some of his ideas does not detract from the great service that he rendered with them to British archaeology. He was the first to undertake a comprehensive and detailed survey of the available evidence—both excavated and from surface fieldwork—about two classes of drystone structures which had previously all too frequently been treated as a peculiarly Scottish phenomenon having few clear relationships with Iron Age cultures further south.

The aim of the Prehistoric Society in undertaking excavations was to uncover systematically a complete settlement and to discover as much as possible about it as a social and economic organism. Little Woodbury had much to recommend it. The existence of a good air-photograph meant that no efforts need be wasted on unproductive work, besides promising interesting results for the interpretation of air-photographs. Being typical of a whole group, its elucidation might be expected to throw light upon a number of similar sites. Further, experience has shown that incontestable results are to be won most readily where the habitation is not too dense and where occupation has been confined to one period. The air-photograph seemed to promise the former, while the test excavations carried out by Mr C. W. Phillips, F.S.A., in March 1938, suggested that the settlement was substantially of the Iron Age A culture.